The New Yorker:

On March 7th, Dan Scavino, Donald Trump’s director of social media, posted a video to Twitter. It depicted Joe Biden endorsing his opponent: “We can only reëlect Donald Trump,” Biden seemed to say. The tweet went viral, and users, who noticed that the video had been selectively edited, reported it to Twitter’s moderators; they, in turn, determined that Scavino’s tweet had violated the company’s new policy on “synthetic and manipulated video,” which had been introduced in February. Twitter has long avoided taking a stance on incendiary and factually inaccurate communiqués from political figures, including the President. This time, though, they footnoted the tweet with a warning label. It ran alongside a small error symbol, rendered in the service’s signature blue.

On May 11th, Twitter announced that its warning system would be expanded to cover misinformation about covid-19. Around two weeks after that, as coronavirus deaths in the United States approached six figures, Trump went on Twitter to sound an alarm about mail-in ballots, claiming, erroneously, that they were “substantially fraudulent” and that their use would lead to a “Rigged Election.” Twitter, explaining that the tweets violated the “suppression and intimidation” section of its civic-integrity policy, appended fact-checking notes to them. The notes urged readers to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and linked to a Twitter “Events” page on the topic, with the headline “Trump Makes Unsubstantiated Claim That Mail-In Ballots Will Lead to Voter Fraud.”

A war had been declared. Two days later, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship.” Ostensibly, the order took aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a crucial snippet of legislation that grants Internet companies immunity from liability for the content posted by their users. In reality, it was a pointed hit. “Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” it read. “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.”

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